In EdTech, the goal is not just a carefully designed curriculum, but also one that enables a seamless learning experience. Unfortunately, fragmented monitoring remains a recurring pain point for most EdTech platforms.
The inability to visualize application performance from the user’s perspective and pinpoint failure points with logs poses a huge business risk in a market where students and instructors alike have zero patience for lagging services.
This article explores the top EdTech challenges created by siloed monitoring tools. We also present real-world scenarios demonstrating how Site24x7 resolves these issues and delivers a smooth learning experience with unified digital experience monitoring (DEM), application performance monitoring (APM), and log correlation.
How does fragmented visibility affect your EdTech business?
Fragmented visibility does not destroy your bottom line in a day. However, if your team continuously struggles to quickly troubleshoot critical issues, frustrated users will soon start moving to the competition.
Let’s discuss how this plays out in real-world EdTech platforms.
Signal overload
It starts with alert storms—uncorrelated alerts from multiple specialized tools:
- Your DEM platform shows higher response times for European students
- Network monitoring flags increased latency and jitter
- The APM solution reports 4x more error rates than usual
- Logs surface failed requests to content delivery endpoints
With disconnected IT teams troubleshooting from isolated dashboards, no one sees the full picture. Mean time to resolution (MTTR) spikes to a dangerous level, leaving students and educators struggling with sluggish lecture sessions and broken learning experiences.
Inaccurate diagnosis
Standalone monitoring tools identify frontend issues like lagging video streams and backend issues like slow database queries. However, these solutions cannot connect the dots.
Teams are then stuck with manual correlation, which leads to misdiagnosing the root cause due to a lack of context.
The result? Outages and interrupted learning sessions start to occur too frequently, alienating learners and educators alike—and eventually lowering engagement.
Isolated troubleshooting
Siloed teams find it infinitely harder to troubleshoot issues reported by different tools because they must manually stitch alerts together. This wastes valuable time and increases operational fatigue.
Meanwhile, teams still miss critical issues hiding in dependencies between services.
Beyond making root cause analysis more difficult, fragmented monitoring duplicates efforts. Engineering, infrastructure, network, and support teams all end up troubleshooting the same failure using different tools, instead of focusing on delivering innovative learning experiences.
Delayed incident resolution
Without a unified view, issues never get fully resolved—only symptoms are addressed. Frontend surfaces slowing down page rendering? Engineers compress images, squeeze out a marginal improvement, and call it a day.
Meanwhile, the root cause—poor database indexing—remains unaddressed, compounding slowly. Eventually, everything unravels with costly consequences during peak usage, e.g., API failures during student enrollment periods or exam seasons.
Inability to be proactive
EdTech platforms depend heavily on reliability and frictionless learning experiences. These are only possible when teams can anticipate issues and fix them before users notice.
Siloed data conceals early warning signs of strain, causing poor service to last longer and frustrated users to ship off to the competition.
Fragmented tools ➡️ higher IT costs ➡️ lower ROI
With teams constantly fighting fires (instead of preventing issues in the first place), support tickets multiply, increasing overhead.
Additionally, managing multiple monitoring tools inflates costs due to duplicated spend on data storage and retrieval, complex integrations, and redundant licenses. Meanwhile, these tools deliver only marginal (if any) user experience enhancements.
Harmonizing DEM, APM, & logs
EdTech platforms must combine a flawless course design, seamless engagement, and uninterrupted uptime. The moment isolated tools impact engagement and uptime, the business model suffers—even if your curriculum is top-notch.
To prevent this, EdTech businesses must unify: digital experience monitoring, application performance monitoring, and logging.
Harmonizing this triad starts with understanding what each has to offer and how solutions like Site24x7 correlate all three to strengthen EdTech resilience.
Getting student/instructor perspectives with DEM
Digital experience monitoring captures the exact learner/educator experience from devices and delivers it to backend services.
Are live classes, material uploads, quiz submissions, and lecture replays going smoothly, or are there stops and starts?
DEM answers these questions through a synthesis of real user monitoring (RUM) to monitor real-time user experience and synthetic user monitoring (SUM) to simulate learner experiences and prevent issues.
Using JavaScript error tracking, it picks up on broken lessons and dashboards. With AJAX call performance monitoring, DEM spots slow response times affecting live sessions, content retrieval, and exam submissions. Meanwhile, session replays let engineers trace user journeys to find the exact point where performance started to lag.
Basically, DEM lets EdTech engineers fix issues, prioritize updates, and innovate continuously based on frontend performance.
Optimizing performance with APM
Application performance monitoring tracks software applications down to code-level transactions. It monitors metrics such as response times, error rates, transaction speeds, and system resource utilization to understand real-time application health.
When students click “submit quiz” and see “Submitting...” timeouts, APM instantly traces the user requests as they travel across microservices, infrastructure, load balancers, etc. This directs engineers to the source of the performance bottleneck, e.g., a poor-performing grading or validation service.
Through application dependency mapping, APM also connects application health with the performance of database, network, caching, and external services. This enables IT teams to predict application availability, e.g., fixing broken login APIs before peak student registration or queuing delays in job execution systems before exam season.
Troubleshooting EdTech platforms with logs
Logs provide an immutable, granular trail of every system event, be it a performance bottleneck, a suspicious activity, or a confirmed security incident. Logs provide IT teams with detailed system-level context about events, errors, and warnings.
Details like stack trace, error message, user ID, and timestamp help visualize “the why” behind poor learning experiences (DEM) and application performance bottlenecks (APM).
If instructors trying to upload learning materials keep seeing 504/500 errors, logs provide the context behind the event. They reveal that the "500 Internal Server Error" was caused by a database connection timeout in the authentication service at 11:30 a.m.
Why is the triad of DEM, APM & logs needed?
Despite the individual strengths of each, DEM alone cannot spot the app performance issue behind the choppy video. APM metrics alone cannot pinpoint the source or time. And logs alone cannot deliver aggregated views of system performance.
It takes a solution that unifies all three, like Site24x7, to significantly transform your EdTech teams’ ability to detect, respond to, and resolve issues—as demonstrated in the real-life examples below.
Example 1: Stabilizing your learning management system (LMS) during peak exam periods
Scenario: Thousands (possibly millions) of students and examiners log in simultaneously to access dashboards and submit exams/papers in real time.
Problem: Your LMS suddenly slows down while error rates increase.
Siloed monitoring: Each tool tells a different story, and teams spend hours trying to find the cause.
Site24x7’s holistic approach: Site24x7 auto-correlates DEM insights with data from your APM, isolating the issue to students using the examSubmissionService. Via a single dashboard, IT teams click an alert to view correlated logs and traces, timestamps, and other metadata and uncover where the request met a roadblock: an overworked plagiarism checker timing out every 30 seconds and backing up submissions.
Teams scale out the service, and submissions begin moving along. No need to chase false leads. Resolution takes minutes, not hours, minimizing exam season disruption.
Example 2: Ensuring seamless integrations with third-party tools
Scenario: Your EdTech platform depends on a myriad of third-party tools, including video services, payment gateways, plagiarism detectors, and proctoring tools.
Problem: Hundreds of support tickets from students indicate your payment gateway is acting up during peak registration.
Siloed monitoring: Everything looks good on your app, backend monitoring gives the green light, and your payment gateway vendor insists their service is perfectly fine.
Site24x7’s holistic approach: Site24x7’s RUM reveals that only iPhone users are affected. With session replay, Site24x7 traces the issue to a JavaScript error: “Transaction Failed: DEVICE NOT SUPPORTED.”
APM metrics correlated with logs show that the SDK’s processPayment method started throwing exceptions for iPhone users after a recent update. Further digging reveals that the iPhone ad blocker considers a network call from the SDK suspicious, causing it to block the traffic.
Teams contact the payment gateway vendor, who immediately reverts to a previous issue-free version. Just like that, you’ve fixed a major issue that fragmented tools would have found impossible to diagnose.
In both scenarios, Site24x7’s core deliverables—correlated insights, consolidated dashboards, and contextualized findings—deliver fast incident turnaround.
Transform learning experiences with Site24x7’s consolidated approach
The EdTech industry is one of the few where maintaining customer trust means you have zero room for downtime. This makes siloed monitoring in EdTech not just a technical flaw, but a full-out business risk.
Site24x7 is one of the few platforms designed to unify DEM, APM, and logs out of the box. Our all-in-one observability approach eliminates alert storms and cuts to the root cause fast, empowering EdTech teams to deliver seamless learning experiences—no outages, no firefighting.
Plus, our advanced AIOps predicts performance and availability issues, allowing teams to stay on top of performance ahead of peak usage times, such as exam, registration, and payment seasons.
Request a free trial to see how Site24x7’s unified approach converts monitoring chaos into lasting EdTech resilience.